Letting Go – A path to happiness

Acceptance is letting go, but it is difficult to accept and let go. There are stages to go through before you get to it. Your starting point is always a love/passion/hatred/greed, but something happens, some kind of a conflict or hard life circumstance, and you move into shock. The change causes you to feel a deep insecurity, which in turn leads to self-protective defensiveness, even anger. There’s a period of denial and some self-pity. You wonder how this could have happened to you. You don’t accept responsibility for the part you played; you run away for a time. But you find yourself missing the goodness and the love that you started out with, but seemed to have lost. This leads to sadness and regret.

In order to accept and let go, you need to reconnect with your heart. Before this happens you can get stuck at the different stages: in insecurity, anger, denial, self-pity or regret. That is all very human and natural, but it’s not pleasant and if it goes on too long, it can damage your spirit. Hopefully you realize this before it gets to that point because it is much harder to let go when you take a vested interest in holding onto a fixed, negative position. You have to realize that you are not fighting a war. What’s happened has happened, so take responsibility for your part, feel the sadness and the love, if you’re able to, and open up your hand and let go.

Go with the flow of life, accept both your strengths and your weaknesses, love yourself, love others, and those you can’t love, try hard to be tolerant of. If you find that you can’t be tolerant, then just move off. Don’t hurt yourself by holding onto resentment. Let go, relax.

Negativity & Positivity – two half of one life

Negativity is part of life and some of it is probably essential to life, but negativity can be like a whirlpool, and once you’re pulled into it you get sucked down into an abyss that is hard to pull yourself out of without some outside help and inside determination. Some suffering is instructional, some even akin to spiritual, but too much of it is just unnecessary. To say that people have suffered and are suffering right now is true. Suffering is pervasive. But to say that by knowing the existence of suffering that you are being more realistic than some about the Truth of Life I don’t think is true.

It sucks, but the negative is easier to embrace than the positive; we fall into patterns of it and get worn down by it. The negative has an unfair advantage. In its very nature it obscures the light, but that doesn’t mean that the light doesn’t exist and that it can’t return to balance out the night. I did pick up on the idea of having an “attitude of gratitude” about difficult circumstances.

Okay, so the negative exists; people commit suicide or die young of disease or accident and ultimately we’re all going to die. Being negative doesn’t make the negative go away or lessen; it intensifies it. But being positive in the face of the negative does have the power to decrease it and sometimes even transforms it into happiness. Most people look upon an enemy as the scum of the earth, not worth anything good, but there are some of us who can try to find the friend inside the enemy. People who have looked at the negative voices this way and also have seen that despite their darkness they are creative, imaginative and intelligent. You just need to embrace both positivity and negativity of life as everything is temporary here

Nothing is permanent – Lord Buddha

You will never finding perfect happiness; life by nature is imperfect and unsatisfying. Happiness will always lead to unhappiness because happiness is unsatisfactory. Contentment or peace is missing most of time in our life. We always expect more from life like permanent security and happiness, permanent love and pleasure with no pain in it. Is our goal in life – getting what we want, what we think we deserve? Can we always arrange, control and manipulate conditions to get what we want? Is happiness and unhappiness dependent on getting what we want and having to get what we want? Can we bring the feeling of “Enough”?

A conscious mind means allowing things to go away. A sensitive and open heart and a clear mind is called bodhichitta in Buddhism. It brings you close to an awakening — to enlightenment. When you understand, it is the attachment that causes suffering. It reminds you of what is most important in life and that is the heart/mind connection, compassion and wisdom in one, forever interconnected. The heart provides the checks and balances for the mind and the mind does the same for the heart. That’s harmony. That’s the yin and yang in balance.

If you can awaken your heart and mind together, you can let go of the grasping that causes you to suffer. You let go the blind attachment, blind quest to find/get something. When you do, all the problems, both real and imagined, start to fade away. You take what you need and leave the rest. You see the things as they truly are! You start understanding not only the beauty but purity of thoughts. You start teaching mind not to attach happiness to the body – sensual way of happiness. You walk away, but with an open spirit. By letting go in peace, you put an end to the conflict and return to freedom. You leave the door open. You remain with an unarmored heart and a clear mind.

The freedom you encounter now is full of new, fresh moments. Clear your heart and mind from the jungle of wild thoughts. Your heart and your mind are stronger for what you have gone through, if you can but see it. That’s one of the challenges of life, finding the constant within the vicissitudes. All those ups and downs can make you lose sight of what matters in any given moment. Change is a constant, so go out there and plant some good seeds and grow your garden of life.